Noun – kalopsia (uncountable)
1. The delusion of things being more beautiful than they are.
Kalopsia
////Cut-Up Technique for Dummies
//Tristan Tzara. TS Eliot. William Burroughs. Brion Gysin. David Bowie. Thom Yorke.
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” – Hassan-i Sabbah
Inspired by Tsara and Burroughs, songwriters such as David Bowie and Thom Yorke of Radiohead have experimented with cut-up for creating song lyrics.
Among the texts used to create the Gospel were reviews I had written of comic books for a website, a transcript of a speech Peter Gabriel would make before performing the song “Supper’s Ready” with the band Genesis, an extract from President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address, and Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” soliloquy. Additionally, I wrote a short exchange, in the style of interdepartmental memos specifically for the Gospel.
William Burroughs, in collaboration with Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville, refined the technique, with Burroughs writing the novels Naked Lunch and the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express) using it. He emphasised that the use of cut-up lowered the emphasis of the traditional role of text.
In addition to cutting and mixing the text based on a set of inputs, it also gave the option of additional changes to the text, such as inverting gender pronouns (changing “he” to “she” etc.), blanking out curse-words (which are replaced with “[expletive deleted]”), and finally an option that converts the text into Jamaican patois.
The cut-up technique has been a fixture of avante garde art, literature and music since as early as the Dadaist movement. Tzara describes using it to create poetry in the fifth of his seven manifestos on Dada, and TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land features extracts from newspapers as part of the text.
Whilst no two versions of the text ever came out the same, the most successful cut-up engine was based on a design by The Lazarus Corporation.
Having already expressed an interest in cut-up technique, I set about picking random samplings of text, and used free software online to generate the desired effect.
For the first week we were instructed to create a hypothetical book based on our reading of The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. The title, picked randomly from a list of thirty possible titles, was The Gospel of Poncho.
Tristan Tzara. TS Eliot. William Burroughs. Brion Gysin. David Bowie. Thom Yorke.
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” – Hassan-i Sabbah
Resources
http://www.languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.html#.UvP0Hvl_s1I
http://www.mundoblaineo.org/cut_up_machine.htm
http://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/cutup
http://www.in-vacua.com/tzara.shtml
Tzara – dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love
//To make a dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
Re-writing and Psychogeography
//Do you have to have lived in a place for a long time before you have the right to tell lies about it?
Inspired by Tim Etchells’ company Forced Entertainment and their piece Ground Plans for Paradise (1995) we used maps of each floor of the library to begin “writing over” the current names and uses. We replaced these, like Forced Entertainment, with “descriptive names, literal names, names that refer to the use we made of the[m]… and not their official function”. I found this to be particularly useful in redefining the space as it made what is a ‘public’ place ‘personal’ to me and to encounters and feelings I had experienced there. Some of these were simply what they reminded me of, for instance the turnstiles on entry to the Library reminded me of a cross between travelling, particularly on the London Underground, and going to football matches with my dad. Not to mention one particular computer station on the second floor where I remember a hard fought day of essay research where nothing seemed to go my way! Other names I assigned were to do with what you could see from that particular area of the building or even the temperature as I found out in the newly built group study area on the ground floor – it was freezing and I aptly called it the fridge! One of the more ironic names was for the stair case opposite Tower Bar which my group named the invisible stairs. Although they can be clearly seen from the outside, few people seem to use them as they are at the opposite end of the ground floor to the entrance, this paired with the amount of people in our group that said ‘I never knew they were here!’ made the name an obvious choice.
This made us consider the psychogeography (where the humans and their environment interact) of the Library as we had done during our adventure into the city noting where people cut path corners etc. It appeared at a first glance at this that there were certain areas of the library more popular than others, certain places that virtually everyone interacted with and others that may have been forgotten or even unknown, such as the Zibby Garnett Library on the first floor had been to me. In future observations this is something I am keen to investigate. Is it merely time dependent or is there is a more common thread worthy of note?
1. Etchells, Tim (1999) “Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City”, Certain Fragments, London: Routledge.
What is a book?
//Beginning journey of a book quest…
Meeting in our second session we were asked to write a list of a hundred titles you would have for a book. As a class we were coming up with a majority of generic answers which mostly questioned life and showed that we always want to know more about the things unknown. We are never happy not knowing the answers to things or not having the scientific explanation. But there will always be answers we cannot look up in google, in a book or from asking someone. Following this we had to produce and present a book to the next class. Upon reading Book as art I was inspired to look into the meaning of a book even further. I thought of ways in which to change or emphasise a book which already had a strong story or message. I went on a quest through the City through the Antique shops and Charity shop along steep hill to find a book that stood alone in a shop. After hours going through the city I was losing faith in finding something quite special. On my way home passing by the OXFAM charity shop I decided to pop in and meander through the shelves. On the top shelf I found two books which really appealed to me. Book One- The Science of Living Things. Covered in red binding the pages were almost sealed tightly from being abandoned for years. The chapter titles were so interesting as the book was written at a time that the real knowledge wasn’t known. I also picked up a marble backed book, inside the front cover read ‘Wuthering heights’ this book was lost on the top shelf too. Book two, telling the a beautiful story of romance with coloured illustrations. I researched these books when I got home and found both were rare copies and of value. I also then went looking for something to help display these two books to the class. I found two pairs of little lights one set red roses for ‘Wuthering Heights’ and the other pink hearts for the other book. My books sat illuminated on the front desk. It was interesting to see the other books in the class, everyone had interpreted the challenge in such a different way. One of the girls did a collage of a brain and said to her “Memories in the brain are like a book”, another example 2 gloves sewn together and binded by a paper cut out of a hand, “Two hands together hold a story, a book”, another was a book re-made by Samantha Thomas where she has a small pocket book and recreated new stories within it adding in creative detail to make her book more personal.
Here are images of the books which I presented:
From this task I learnt that to different people a book has a different appreciation, meaning and value. Sometimes its not the story or information it holds but the appearance which also defines what it is. A book can be wanted, lost, found, recovered and re-discovered. No book will mean the same to everyone.